The Dirty Streets of Heaven

did link them-they were all significant people.

As this struck me, I felt a prickle run up my spine. Scientists, educators, entrepreneurs, and even a minister. I scanned the list again, and now that I was looking for it, it screamed out at me: they weren’t all as rich as Edward Walker by any means, but they were all accomplished people who had made their way in the world and done so very successfully. Proud people, and with good reason to be. Bright, determined, and probably articulate.

Proud people.

Struck by a sudden hunch I dialed a number I hadn’t called in a while-the Walker house. I was in luck: Garcia Windhover answered the phone.

“Yo. G-Man talking at you.”

“Bobby Dollar here. I need you to do me a favor.”

“Sweet! I’m all over it, boss.”

Boss? Did he think he was my deputy now? Or worse, my assistant? “Uh, okay. Well, if Posie’s there with you I need you to get her out of the house for about two hours. Can you do that? You see, I’m worried. I think she might be in danger at her place.” I explained to you how sometimes even angels like me have to stretch the truth, didn’t I? “Give me a couple of hours, and I’ll let you know when it’s safe to go back.” I explained it would be best if he could get her out of the neighborhood entirely for the afternoon.

He promised he’d give it a shot. “I’ll tell her it’s like a bomb threat or something.”

It wasn’t a very good excuse, but obviously she wasn’t the most discerning young lady, either. I decided not to micromanage. “Thanks…G-Man. I’ll be in touch in a couple of hours.”

Was I feeling guilty? Good question, but I wasn’t putting him and Posie in danger-the contrary, if anything. I was heading for the Walker house, and the farther they stayed away from me the better their chances of a long, happy life, since I was a bit of a disaster magnet at the moment.

I left Orban’s loaner Benz around the corner from the Walker place and let myself into the yard through the side gate. The house was empty, which meant G-Man had done his job. I hadn’t bothered to ask him to leave the house unlocked for me because of the terrifying possibility that if he knew I was going to be there he might sneak back to try to help me. Anyway, anybody who was in the Harps can pick a lock with his eyes closed and his hands tied. I wasn’t trying to make things interesting, so I was inside in a minute or so. The house hadn’t changed much, except that more dust had gathered on the books and objets d’art since my last visit. I got the feeling that Posie was squatting in the place more than inhabiting it. Perhaps it was going to be sold, which made it even more important that I find what I was looking for today.

There was one problem, though: I didn’t actually know what I was looking for. As I’d reviewed Fatback’s material on the local victims, I had become more and more certain that someone like Edward Lynes Walker, a successful, well-known man, wouldn’t just kill himself without even trying to explain it, unless he was very, very depressed, if for no other purpose than the apology many suicides left. But Walker had no history of depression, and judging from the coverage of his death, it seemed that everybody who knew him had been astonished that he had taken his own life. It’s damn hard to prove a negative, of course, and the absence of a note certainly didn’t indicate murder. But if I did find a suicide note that others had missed, or anything that would shed some light on his frame of mind in his last days, I might be able at least to eliminate foul play and narrow my focus to what had happened after he died.

My only lucky break was that most of Edward Walker’s working life seemed confined to the room he had probably called a “study,” but which a later generation would have called an office; a big, sunny upstairs bedroom oriented around a handsome antique writing desk, on which his computer, a fairly expensive Dell Precision, still sat. The walls were lined with bookcases except for a low table on one side of the door and two large metal filing cabinets on the other. I didn’t bother checking the computer, and not only because the police lab and probably his lawyer would have already examined it thoroughly. Although he was no doubt very technologically literate, Walker seemed to me like the old-school kind of guy who would always have a hard copy of anything important. In fact, if he was concerned enough about snoopy hackers he might not even have committed it to electronic memory. After all, Edward Lynes Walker had been born into the last analog generation.

There are two different ways to toss a room: the kind where you know what you’re looking for and the kind where you don’t. The first kind is easier because you can immediately eliminate a lot of things. For instance, if you’re looking for a picnic basket you don’t need to spend a lot of time searching in envelopes. I didn’t have that luxury, so I started pulling things out of cabinet drawers as quickly as I could and setting them on the floor. After about half an hour the carpet looked like the downtown San Judas skyline crafted from piles of paper and beige cardboard, and I sat down and began working my way through.

I pulled out every sheet of paper in all of those files, one sheet at a time, and examined each one, albeit briefly. For an otherwise lazy guy I’m pretty thorough, but at the end of the first two hours of hard grafting I hadn’t come across anything out of the ordinary, although after having looked at thousands of snippets of Walker’s life I was beginning to feel as if I was finally getting to know him. For one thing, just reading his business correspondence made it clear that he was no sucker. He might have had an overly keen belief in his own undefeatable good sense (which I have found is often true with engineering types) but I was equally certain he wouldn’t have bought any pitch without proof. The atheism first suggested by his books seemed to arise not out of a dislike of religion per se, but from a feeling that anything that couldn’t be scientifically proved wasn’t worth wasting time on. Did that make him more of an agnostic than an atheist? Walker certainly hadn’t been religious, no matter how you sliced it. If by some chance his disappearance had been voluntary, why would someone who didn’t believe in an afterlife decide to play hide-and-go-seek with Heavenly authorities?

More than two hours had now gone by. Posie might convince her boyfriend to bring her home any time, but I wasn’t ready to give up. I hurried through all the books in the office, pulling each from its shelf and inspecting it for stray envelopes or pieces of paper tucked inside, without luck. It took a long time but I was being thorough. I got all the books back into place and the room tidied just as I heard a car pull into the driveway. I wasn’t panicked-I knew I could make Dozy Posie believe just about anything, and I couldn’t imagine G-Man putting up much of an intellectual struggle either, but I didn’t want to push my luck in case I had to get back into the house again, although I wasn’t sure it would be worth it. After all, I’d failed to find what I was looking for despite a pretty thorough search, so I was beginning to doubt the sudden certainty that had set me off, a hunch that had seemed very powerful just a few hours earlier.

I hurried down the stairs and stopped dead, staring. I had completely forgotten the books in the living room shelves, most of which were art books, business manifestos, and a few novels. But right in front of me were several rows of religious material-well, anti-religious, mostly-that now seemed to me like as good place to leave a suicide note as in his office. But I could hear keys rattling in the door, which meant I couldn’t stay. I’d have to come back another time.

Then I saw it, down near the bottom of the nearest bookshelf, between one of Dawkins’ books and Mark Twain’s Letters From the Earth-the black leather, gilded spine of a King James Bible. As they used to sing on Sesame Street, “One of these things is not like the others.” The front door was opening, so I just reached out and grabbed. Then the angel with the stolen bible under his coat (that would be me) sprinted through the kitchen to the back door and escaped into the yard, only seconds ahead of the bible owner’s granddaughter and her faux-gangster boyfriend.

twenty-seven

the atheist’s bible

I drove a little farther into Palo Alto, then stopped in a quiet residential street. As soon as I took out the heavy, leather-bound bible I could see that something had been pressed inside the pages, a rather fat envelope. I was lucky it hadn’t dropped out during my hasty exit. The writing on it said only “To be opened after my death,” in handwriting that looked like what I’d seen of a few samples of Walker’s.

Jackpot. And everybody missed it but me!

I used a tissue to open the envelope, in case I needed to leave it for the police to find, and handled it the same way. Inside were at least a dozen sheets typed on thin, old-fashioned paper, which made the document seem